Feature stapling

Feature stapling:
Primary purpose of the feature stapling is to extend and customize existing site definitions. Usually these are used to provide some custom functionalities for the out of the box site definitions, but technique is definitely available also for the custom site definitions.

Since it’s not supported to change the onet.xml file of site definitions after it has been used in environment, feature stapling is quite commonly used also to provide versioning for the already deployed custom site definitions. You can modify the stapling definitions to different site definitions also afterwards. It’s important to remember that stapled features are only activated on provisioning time, so if there’s any existing sites already provisioned, those won’t be affected automatically just by deploying new stapling definitions.

Biggest downside with the feature stapling is that we can only extend the existing site definitions, we can’t provide new. This can be an issue for example when you’d like to have WCM templates created for multiple different site purposes. Also the fact that stapled features are activated before the module element or list elements in onet.xml file has been provisioned, can cause issues unless you use some workarounds. Notice also that feature stapling is only supported when site definitions are used, it doesn’t work if you are provisioning sites using site templates or web templates, even though these both options refers to root site definition.

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